Dude…How Did We Get Here?

Last October at the homecoming at Lincoln University I was hanging out with one of my Fraternity brothers who was lamenting about his increased girth and his inability to “hop” the way he used to. He said he was concerned about his health. I told him that he was not the athletic/slim person I remembered him being.

I went on to tell him that I was actually a weight management physician and that I treat patients with morbid obesity — a condition that by 2030, nearly half of the residents in the US will have and by that time 1 in 4 will progress to being severely obese.

He paused and asked me, “Dude ..how did YOU get here to manage this condition.” He knew that I was born in Guyana and grew up in Brooklyn NY before attending the first HBCU Lincoln University, where we pledged Omega Psi Phi, Inc.

After undergrad, I went to medical school at Temple University where I got the “surgical bug.”’ The last thing he recalled was that I was a surgical resident at Temple. I told him that after that, I did my Bariatric(weight loss) surgical fellowship at NYU under the tutelage of Drs. George Feilding and Christine Ren-Fielding.

After I finished my Fellowship, I became a weight reduction Surgeon and moved to the Northern New Jersey area to combat that chronic disease Obesity. Initially this was a fulfilling career where I saw patients get better, lose significant weight, get their lives back and get rid of their co-morbid conditions like diabetes, hypertension and sleep apnea.

This was great. But what I noticed after a while was that this was not an easily defeated disease. Surgery was only a tool, and If the tool was not used effectively it would not work long term. And, a patient can slowly regain their weight and co-morbid conditions if their lifestyle did not change.

I had so many patients tell me “Doc, I’m losing weight, and I can still eat what I want.”  That was the issue. They had the tool to lose the weight, but they did not know how to use the tool effectively.